The present invention relates to a window surface polishing device for aircraft.
For safety's sake, airplane windows are made of difficult-to-break hard glass or hard acrylic resin and double-structured. During high-speed flights, however, the outside window is bombarded with and abraded by fine particles and dust in the air, and hence inevitably suffers from "scratches" and "crevice-like cracks extending into the inside of the windowpane", commonly referred to as crazing, which obstruct the view from the window and give rise to diffuse reflection of sunlight.
It is customary, at present, to polish and smooth window surfaces at regular intervals for customer's satisfaction, but the polishing is done by handwork, for airplane windows are curved unlike those of ordinary buildings and are difficult of automatic polishing. However, airplane windows are not only large in number but also are double-structured as mentioned above and cannot be removed from the outside of the airplane body.
Therefore, the polishing must be done, for instance, in the following steps of: (1) removing seats near each window; (2) removing the inner wall around the window; (3) taking the window frame down and removing the inside windowpane; (4) taking out the outside windowpane; (5) carrying the outside windowpane into a polishing workshop and polishing it by handwork using a motor-driven polisher or the like; and (6) taking the polished windowpane to the plane and fitting it into the window by reversing the procedure (1) to (5) outlined above. However, this method is troublesome and time-consuming, and hence is extremely disadvantageous for the operation of airplanes. In addition, the handwork sometime causes insufficient finish such as uneven surfaces so that it may shorten the lifetime of the windowpane due to overgrinding or the like. Much skill is required for uniform polishing but causes a marked increase in polishing costs.